‘A Fairly Unclouded Life’

Although not entirely indistinguishable from one another, the young upper-class males of the early Jeeves and Wooster are a uniform type. They are physically and mentally weak, passive, lazy and vulnerable. In this way, they represent a disruption of upper-class masculinity perceived by the middle classes at the end of the First World War. ¹ By ridiculing the lifestyle of privileged young men and showing them failing to meet the expectations and responsibilities associated with their rank in society, the stories entertain a middle-class fantasy of declining aristocratic power. This fantasy is not wholly disconnected from reality, but is a response to a real (though not, in the end, apocalyptic) decline in aristocratic power post-war. This presentation of upper-class power under threat from the blunderings of its younger generations speaks appealingly to a middle-class audience because it offers an almost seditious undermining of upper-class authority. This is typical of what Nicola Humble terms the ‘covert radicalism’ of middlebrow literature (Feminine Middlebrow Novel 5). On the one hand, the stories encourage cynicism about the validity of class hegemony. At the same time, although the foolish and foppish upper-class male they depict does not merit the master status he is granted by the class system, he emerges ultimately as harmless, impotent and innocent, and the challenge to the system that keeps him in power remains muted.